We're going to be doing, hopefully, regular blog posts regarding the development of Crash Catch, our new crash and error monitoring service.

Now, if you've been here before, you might be thinking didn't you recently shutdown a crash monitoring service, and you'd be right, it was called CritiMon.

CritiMon was originally built just for myself to fix certain issues I had with existing platforms. I originally had no intention on selling it, and at the last stages, on a bit of a whim, thought why not give it a try. It was therefore never really researched into what it should do, but more on how I wanted it to work, and very quickly we discovered that it wasn't liked, and the branding colours weren't liked and the name wasn't liked - someone suggested it sounded like a Pokemon. So all in all, wasn't a great success, so decided to shut it down.

I still believe the issues I found myself that made me attempt to build my own service, is still valid for others to use as well, but this time did a bit more research into what other platforms provided and spent a lot more time on the design, user interface and the user experience - this wasn't originally thought about a great deal as it was just being built for myself to use.

The first step, was the new name, Crash Catch. Hopefully this is more to the point, more descriptive of what the service does, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't sound like a Pokemon.

We therefore bought the domain crashcatch.com and put a temporay landing page. I need to work on this a fair bit more, especially for mobile but we also need to provide more information and screenshots when I have a bit more of the development completed.

The re-development is primarily on the frontend, the backend is mostly being reused from CritiMon as functionality wise its more a less there. However there are some differences and enhcements on the backend as well so this will be included during the development.  

On to the development stage.

Streaming the Development

For this development, I want to be a lot more transparent during the development and open to getting feedback from our fellow users and developers, after all, you are who I am developing this for.

The first act in doing this is to live stream some of the development on Twitch. I've already done a couple of streams as a trial run and test how things work. The first stream was a bit of a disaster, I am going to do a blog post about that too, but I will continue to keep going. The recordings of these streams may also go up on YouTube once I get things ironed out slightly - the VODs will be available on Twitch now though for a short period of time. I will be streaming all aspects of the development from the frontend (ReactJS) to the backend (PHP and C++)

What Progress Have We Made

We have made a fair amount of progress so far. The login page is basic currently, purely just lets you login but we have implemented the following features:

• Dashboard (Project listing with placeholder information that needs development)
• Select project (view crash groups and select the crash group and the details regarding the crash - currently only for Android)
• Manage team members - Add users to your team, invite users etc - need to development the profile management of users

There is still a lot that I need to do but progress is moving forward, and I hope with these live streams  and blog posts I can gets of feedback and make this service one of the best crash reporting services.

You can find some screenshots on the current development below. Let us know what you think.  

Current Development Status

As always, we want to hear from you, so feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me an email or send me a message on my personal Twitter or Boardies IT Solutions Twitter